Vivaldi 4.0
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser but by then it was too late.
It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.
It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality like the email client if you didn't use it.
Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(
Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but they're really slow and bulky.
Still, I wish them luck.
However, Opera supported an MDI interface before it supported tabs, and if you count that it may have supported multiple browser windows within one MDI window even earlier, which could be said to be a form of tabs.
Everything depends on how you define "tabs", as usual.
I still customise my Chrome and Firefox mouse gestures add-ons to work exactly this way, despite having long forgotten where those conventions originally came from.
Other gestures I have, probably also from Opera:
DL: Left tab
RL: Right tab
D: Page Down
U: Page Up
RLR: Close tab/window
Sadly the last two were killed off in Firefox in that last big add-on update. I didn't find anything that works since then.
Sure, my current browser supports the latest web standards that enable great things and sure, my internet speed is a lot higher. But just from a "browsing the web" perspective, Opera was the high point.
Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific functions they probablly were the first ones.
If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on some privacy invading sites.
you can in firefox settings
you can also do it in chrome with the cli parameter --proxy-server
Obviously a remnant from the Netscape codebase. They will fix it.
I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.
Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.
Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.
If you have some time you can look through:
- all the .enabled entrys in
- all the .disabled entrys
Flash was almost certainly not an essential part of the web. 2012 was 5 years after the iPhone and by then Android and iPhone constituted the majority of web browsing, and neither supported flash at all.
You couldn't very well say something was an essential part of the web if it wasnt supported on those devices in 2012.
We had the option to use JS as well but it wasn't in the curriculum and 4 out my 5 person team didn't want to do any of the extra work.
Even if Flash was used, it was mostly video players and some online games (like Newgrounds). I think YouTube came out with their HTML5 player in 2012 so Flash was definitely moving into a more niche status and I don't consider it essential after Flash based sites went out of fashion (which was closer to 2008-2009. HTML5, ECMA5 and CSS3 (or just HTML, JS and CSS as it's known today) largely made flash redundant before 2012.
Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)
> you don't get to know its status in the meantime
Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.
They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.
[1] https://habr.com/ru/company/vivaldi/blog/561834/#comment_231... (in Russian)
Opera/Vivaldi CEO is really adamant about hiding both staff and user counts. Vivaldi even removed itself from User Agent string.
All browsers wants to use a unique user agent.
It is the only way to prove market share => $$$.
But it is ridiculously difficult to modify it without breaking sites.
Take a look at your own user agent.
It is likely it identifies itself as gecko/mozilla/chrome/safari/IE/KHTML all in one.
so, technically not very different to Brave although many users are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase
Native UIs are much faster than web UIs, for example.
As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures, Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind the old Opera experience.
I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most: Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is rather slow, as the parent post says.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/nrasof/fix_...
tldr: Tab bar is just a DIV full of SPANs, one SPAN per Tab. Pages are in a list of DIVs containing iframes. Switching a Tab is a simple process of moving "active" class from one SPAN to another and changing style of one iframe to "visibility: hidden; z-index: -1;" while another one gets "visibility: inherit; z-index: initial;". So far so ~good. So how does Vivaldi handle Tab close? You would guess closing a Tab would entail
- switching iframe visibility away from Tab being closed first - instant visual feedback for the user
- removing SPAN representing Tab we want closed
- maybe fixing widths of remaining SPANs
10 Tabs open and you close the first one = ~30 DOM Reflows.
100 Tabs open and you close two in the middle = ~300 DOM Reflows.
100 Tabs open and you close first 10 = ~3000 DOM Reflows.
Stuttering UI is the staple of Vivaldi, codebase is full of functions running in linear/polynomial time to the number of Tabs open/Tab position on the list, in places where O(1) is trivial. Vivaldi is a browser that used to Resize contents of every single Tab opened when you resized its window - resizing was slower the more Tabs you had in Tab bar :o, going fullscreen could take 10 seconds.
That actually explains a lot.
It would be interesting to know if they lose a lot of users because of slowness, but since it hasn't been fixed, I guess they don't?
Every bit of speed feedback is met with /impossibru, works great here/ from the staff.
I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home with Vivaldi now.
I was thinking of the normal in-page stuff. My apologies if I misled anyone.
That is not my experience at all. I tried a few different versions over the years (including the beta with the mail client, but not yet this 4.0) and the UI always feels ... slow, and not quite snappy enough to be comfterable. It's really hard to describe this and I'm not the kind of person who quickly gets annoyed by this sort of thing, but for me personally it's too much and every time I tried it it was annoying enough to give up after a day or two. It's like using some remote connection with X or vnc (okay, maybe not quite that bad, but definitely reminiscent of that).
In comparison, Chromium or Firefox doesn't have this at all on the same computer.
Maybe it's a Linux thing; I don't know. I can imagine it's not the highest priority for them. A lot of it seems in the UI layer (and not the rendering layer), which is vastly different from Chromium. I hope they will improve this at some point (and I'll try out this version, too) because outside of this Vivaldi looks pretty neat.
I still miss Opera Presto :-(
I've tried switching to Vivaldi at least 5 times since release, but can't get used to this delay.
But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.
And I've got a keyboard shortcut to open the current site in Vivaldi as a fallback.
It's an honest question, since as a user I really love it. Is it the 'dev-friendly', which Firefox lacks?
After misclicking hundreds of times, I still couldn't train myself to go against my perception and follow the designer's "bold vision", using it feels like writing with my left hand or steering a bicycle with a crooked wheel.
• Profiling functions between Chrome/FF reveals that Chrome is frequently considerably faster (usually 60%+)
• During WebGL work I'll often hit blue screens around memory management (this seems to be a relatively recent development)
• Similarly, trying to profile a WebRTC application with video feeds will consistently trigger a blue screen. (I can tell this is from FF, as the browser itself flashes white a few times before the system goes down.)
• Things like the UI changing - while minor - are enough to cause inconvenience, plus the occasional random feature removal (View Image context menu option) indicates that I'm not necessarily the target audience for the browser.
I actually slightly prefer the devtools in FF than Chrome, but there are a number of quirks that have started appearing over the past year or so, ranging from actual bugs to just weird UX.
As I write this, I'm realizing I'd love a browser that's seen more as a devtool than a catch-all web navigator which happens to have a profiler built in.
What normally happens with native GPU intensive apps is that devs change their code to work around driver and OS crashes, and if the app becomes popular, GPU vendors will react to frequent crashes from that app with driver fixes.
I actually liked the UI they implemented in Android. Alas, I seem to be in a minority
That said:
I'm not salty because they replaced XUL but because they mostly gutted it without replacement.
I'm salty because they pretend we are a community whenever they want donations but write as if we are enemies when we try to ask very nicely about something that is missing and has been missing for years.
I'm also salty because they really haven't been clear about donations not going to browser work but to all kinds of niche projects.
Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even more.
And don’t forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
- Jamie Zawinski
I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use freeware when you can use premium software (which other people supposedly even pay for) for free".
I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.
Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more popularity than if you release it for free.
One of the worst things to happen to the web was for Google to start pushing at a speed and scale only they could keep up with.
The web is theirs now.
Clarifying it became a freeware browser which even after the end of its life remained closed source.
>but by then it was too late
It was the third most popular browser in the pre-Chrome era after IE and Firefox.
I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great, periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.
Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though not ideal.
Then it got huge, and Chrome was amazing. And it seemed impossible for FF to be able to work out the technical debt.
Now Chrome often makes the fan kick in on my MBP and Firefox is lighter again in CPU and memory.
I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this machine, but I just don’t enjoy using it. Not sure why. Maybe I’m old and it’s just change.
Sadly, I did hit my first work website that only worked in Chrome this week. No FF, no Safari.
Safari always gives me the feeling of being too basic. The extension ecosystem is very small, and settings panels try their hardest not to actually give you any options beyond the essential ones. It's a browser for people who endure the web, not enjoy it.
[EDIT] but yes, FF and Chrome/Chromium destroy it on a feature basis. I just value those other things so much, and both of those options are so bad at those things, that I prefer Safari anyway.
Maybe I'm an anomaly in the HN crowd, but I never really got into extensions even when I was using Firefox or Chrome as a daily driver. I have an extension for 1Password, an extension for a read-it-later service (for years Instapaper, lately GoodLinks), and somewhat grudgingly, an ad blocker. And sometimes a user style sheet extension. I've tried other extensions at various points and they've never really stuck, not even the "vertical tab" style extensions that I want to love but always find ugly and distracting. (OmniWeb, RIP, is the only browser I ever used that had what I thought was a great implementation of this.)
And I use Chrome daily at work now, because there are a few internal sites that require it (and one that inexplicably requires IE 10, which Chrome turns out to be better at faking than Safari), and... it's fine? But it feels just a little slower, it's harder on the battery, and there's very little about it that I miss when I'm back in Safari on my personal Mac. Maybe if I was deep into web development again, this would change, since Safari's dev tools always seem to be a few steps behind Chrome's. Maybe there's some magic can't-live-without extension I could find on Chrome or Firefox that would sway me to stick with one for the long haul. But for years, I've enjoyed the web, and I've enjoyed it on Safari. [shrug emoji]
We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.
I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great!
It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).
I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.
But apparently there's an official way to apply CSS mods using vivaldi://experiments/ and Settings > Appearance
[1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-a-scr...
Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues so far.
The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.
I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.
Last time was a couple of years ago and I had some trouble between instances but maybe I didn't do it right.
Ungoogled-Chromium is what I use when I want to use a feature in Chromium Devtools that isn't available in FF, or when I just beed to test my site in Blink.
It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs for quite some time now.
edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.
Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave up.
I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome and Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I upgrade my computer.
But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's a hidden setting you need to enable first, in vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a new computer.
The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I gave them the exact steps to fix it.
You need to restart it for the checkbox to take effect.
They unfortunately don't have a public bug tracker.
For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs, something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+ tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this, because dogma.
Seems like your bar is low, but not that low.
I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine on the right side.
Not sure I'll keep it this way ... but what I ♥ about Vivaldi is the choice. If I wanted training wheels, I would already be using macOS.
I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be thrown away considering privacy concerns.
I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any competition to the market.
The short version is: they get money from things like search engine deals, which guide Vivaldi users to third-party services.
I’m just finding it really hard to believe that it’s sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team…
Firefox is funded the same way, and they seem to have plenty of income...
But my point was more around how the minimal amount of money coming from other search engines or sponsored bookmarks can’t sustain a browser dev team.
So there are definitely other decent sources of income besides Google for these deals and since it's a significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem implausible to me.
But here's why there's confusion. Yahoo search at the time (or shortly before or after) switched to using Bing's search and ad engine.
As I said, there are definitely other decent sources of income besides Google for these deals and since it's a significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem implausible to me.
The browser's market share will ultimately determine the market value of the search partnership, so Vivaldi will likely have a much lower income from it than Firefox, but it's in no way limited by whether they partner with Google or with any other search provider. For a smaller more efficient team, not maintaining their own browser engine, it could easily compare in sustainability to Firefox's income stream.
That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.
Browsing the source code, I love the author's habit to make a code commit every single day [0]. That looks like a powerful way to move the project forward while avoiding fatigue.
https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/commits/170f36...
- Installing and upgrading was a pain on Linux, and compiling was even worse. At first there were no AppImage for it. Then they were created but at first they were half-broken (the whole process of creating an AppImage is hacky and Qt projects were especially hard). It seems the AppImage broke again in 2018.
- The web engine comes from Qt. IIRC, it's an old fork of webkit. Many sites were not compatible, and I suspect the situation goes worse with every year.
I recommend trying Otter, but don't expect it to replace your everyday browser.
Just don't tell them I told you ...
Meaning search over within browser window i.e. “Find in Page”?
I didn't experience any slowdown, but not being able to drag and drop files from downloads is a pain in the ass. It's been brought up on the forums and left at that years ago.
The formulations try really hard not to say "trust us with your data instead of big tech", which seems like an attempt to hide the fact that they do have access to everything you translate, much like Google would have... The only question is who you trust more - Vivaldi or Google?
Who do you trust less with your most personal data - Vivaldi or Google? I think the answer is pretty easy.
It's just that, if you're the average person, you're already being spied upon massively by Google and you're trying to figure out if a company orders of magnitude smaller is a credible threat to your data.
Unfortunately I get a massive delay when fullscreening youtube videos in Vivaldi. The video first maximizes to the left half of my screen, and only then expands to the whole thing. Sadly a dealbreaker. FWIW its a little faster if I have the browser already maximized.
I miss the little search bar for tabs that Vivaldi shows in the vertical tabs view.
Since as early as October 2020 on testing [1] and as early as January 2021 on stable [2].
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/vertical-tab...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-r...
(1) it touches Vivaldi server on startup.
(2) "Google Service DNS to help resolve navigational errors" equals https://medium.com/cloud-security/google-chrome-dns-security...
Gonna keep using Brave...
And there was me hoping for Exchange-Sync support for Microsoft 365 email integration, to release the local reliance on Outlook 365 which gets worse with every revision :(
Once you've experienced all three working seamlessly on a mobile phone against Exchange (Online or on-prem) you realise how fragmented other 'Mail' sync systems are.
Unfortunately my org does not publish exchange as IMAP either.
Especially everything tabs feels awful. From new tab, to drag-and-drop.
(...)we offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly translation feature, powered by Lingvanex and hosted by Vivaldi, keeping translations out of the reach of companies like Google or Microsoft.
Now I'm supposed to trust Vivaldi instead of Google or MS... Stopped reading right there.
I tried to use built in mail and calendar, but unfortunately my (work) life is too dependent on the little integrationa of Google calendar and gmail
how much spyware is in their browser? is it fully open sourced?
I believe the source is online but not licensed under a free license (Someone is free to correct me on that).
Last line on the page: "Before using Vivaldi Webmail and the blogging platform, we’ll ask you to verify your phone number. That’s it."
But it's being developed by a very small community, and probably can't keep up, haven't tried it in a while.
There's honestly very little value in yet another IMAP client. Fixing a little bit the broken ecosystems around Exchange would be a million times more useful to the world.
1. It's a beta product.
2. It's free.
3. They support IMAP/POP3 so you can make do with that for now.